Video: What do you actually do at baseball’s Winter Meetings? – Yahoo Sports

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Baseball’s annual Winter Meetings are a surreal place. Practically everyone in the baseball industry converges into a mega hotel for an event that’s a combination of general managers and agents trying to woo each other, reporters looking for scoops, front-office job seekers looking for a gig and trade-show people trying to sell their latest products.

That absurdity isn’t helped by the fact that the days run upward of 16 hours sometimes and it’s not hard to spend three days at the Winter Meetings without even going outside.

To the naked eye, it really just seems like a lot of people standing around. Sometimes they assemble in circles — like when an MLB manager has a scheduled media session or late at night when they’re discussing the day’s events in the bar or hotel lobby — but sometimes it’s more like thousands of people waiting for something to happen.

That leads to a pretty simple but fascinating question: What do people *actually* do at the Winter Meetings?

So we asked some people this week at the Gaylord National Resort and Conference near Washington D.C., where this year’s edition of the Winter Meetings wrap up Thursday. In the video above you’ll see four of the most interesting types of people at this event:

• The GM: Bobby Evans of the San Francisco Giants

• The Manager: Buck Showalter of the Baltimore Orioles

• The Player: Todd Coffey, a 36-year-old relief pitcher looking for another shot in the big leagues

• The Job Seeker: Jeremy Rochford, a young man looking for a scouting job in baseball who attended this year’s event with a “Please Interview Me” sign. (You can find him here, if you want to hire him)

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Mike Oz is the editor of Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at mikeozstew@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @MikeOz